For the trail nerds;)

This is for all my work peeps/other trail nerds of the world. As I’ve been running and hiking around Chamonix, I’ve decided that when I come back to work in Washington we should embrace a new version of building trails. One in which we just go straight up rock walls and call it good;)

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This, for example, was from a sweet hike I took with my new adoptive French family (heh) last weekend. Jeanne is hiking in front of me, and as we were walking I told her that I was playing the find-the-trail game that I like to play where I try to guess how I’m about to go over a pass, but I had absolutely no idea how we were going to get over this big rock face in front of us. So she pointed out where the trail goes basically straight up the wall, in that red oval. I’m not sure if you can see it, but there are two folks in that oval on their way up, and that is indeed the trail!

This is how it starts:

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(Jeanne getting after it, with Mont Blanc and the Chamonix valley in the background:)

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And then it keeps going with a variety of cables, ropes, ladders, and steps bolted into the rocks.

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(Picture by Cyril)

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(Picture OF Cyril;) And the hodgepodge of steps/ropes/railing/what-have-you to get up)

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(And one more for good measure, of the ladder incarnation of help. Picture by Cyril again)

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I know I included some pictures before of some engaging route-following, but the regularity with which I have run into this kind of thing has been a whole new realm of trail for me. Sometimes things like this are labeled on the routefinding signs with an extra “passage délicat,” but not always. I’m still not sure exactly how you’re supposed to know beforehand what you’re getting into if you’re afraid of heights, for example, and would find this sort of rock scramble to be a total no-go. Luckily, I’m super into it, so if I happen upon this kind of thing I’m always a little excited:)

Which is why I plan to bring this back to Washington trailbuilding, heh.

We’ll definitely have to relax our leave-no-trace ethics and start bolting things into rocks, but that’s not so super different from sport climbing where you bolt anchors into rocks anyway. It’ll just be a mash-up of hiking and climbing;)

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(step assists as well as the typical routefinding signs bolted onto the rocks. These particular steps happened to be when I was in Switzerland for a sec, but this is what I’ve been seeing in France too:)

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We might also have to embrace colorful circles painted onto the rocks to show you where the route goes. This one has a happy face which I thought was cute, but mostly they’re just circles, frequently yellow, that you can follow the way you would follow cairns.

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(paint = much more permanent route-setting than cairns;)

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It’ll honestly make it a lot easier to build trails, I think: rather than spend too much time trying to find a sustainable alignment that works with the landscape, we’ll just build a nice trail until we run into a rock face, and then bolt railings into it and use it as a durable surface upon which folks can gain most of their elevation:

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(for bonus points, also find the yellow route-finding circle!:)

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(no reason to be deterred by a rock face! Just add a rope and bolt some steps into the wall! :)

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Heh. I’m being kind of facetious, but I really have been loving this sort of thing a lot. It adds a fun element of almost-rock-climbing to my adventures here — and since these kind of things seem to be casually scattered about everywhere, just a normal trail feature, it feels like they just crop up randomly to delight me as I explore;)

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(These ladders, for example, were on one of the most popular trails I’ve been on yet, on the way up to Lac Blanc. Literally thousands of people get to these ladders and then just go up (and down) them, no big deal)

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So that is all. When my sabbatical is over and I find myself trail-working again, I may have a slightly different conception of what counts as a trail, heh.

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(Definitely a hiking trail!)